Klára Hosnedlová’s installation, “embrace,” at Hamburger Bahnhof’s historic hall is her largest solo exhibition and most ambitious sculptural work to date. Commissioned through the CHANEL Commission, it features tapestries up to nine meters high, embroideries, organic reliefs, and site-specific objects made from materials like flax, glass, sandstone, clay, iron, and concrete. The work explores themes of home, utopia, and everyday life, drawing from the cultural memory of the Czech Republic’s border regions, shaped by shifting borders and artisanal-industrial processes. Embroidery motifs are inspired by the artist’s performative interventions in Berlin, while concrete and iron elements reflect communist-era architecture. The CHANEL Commission supports large-scale, innovative projects, transforming the museum’s 2,500-square-meter hall into an immersive space for contemporary sculpture.
Klára Hosnedlová: Embrace / Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. Vernissage, May 1, 2025.
Press text (excerpt):
“embrace” in the Historic Hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof is Klára Hosnedlová’s largest expansive sculptural installation to date: nine metre-high flax tapestries with stone reliefs hang above a floor covered with concrete slabs. Speaker towers sourced from Berlin clubs draw visitors deeper into Hosnedlová’s mythical landscape with a sound composition. As visitors make their way past muddy puddles, detailed embroideries of fleeting moments become visible on the fossil-like reliefs. “embrace” combines the organic and inorganic, permanence and decay, handcraft and industrial production. The exhibition marks the start of the annual CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof.
Klára Hosnedlová (born in 1990 in Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic; lives in Berlin) works with materials deeply rooted in the regions of present-day Czech Republic (formerly Bohemia and Moravia). The combination of centuries-old craft traditions, regional folklore, and brutalist architecture unites historical, political, and cultural narratives in expansive installations. Hosnedlová transforms the industrial architecture of the historic hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof into a mythical landscape, opening up a space in which personal childhood memories create a universal language of imagination. “embrace” is made of glass, concrete, flax, hemp, thread, sand, metal, and sound. The materials connect fundamental contrasts such as organic and inorganic, permanence and decay, handcraft and industrial production. The installation shows how landscapes, materials, and cultural practices are constantly changing and reshaping themselves over time.
The muted colours, rough textures and branching tendrils of the six tapestries are reminiscent of animal skins or creatures from another world. The fabric, made from flax and hemp, was woven by hand and dyed with plant-based dyes. The centuries-old tradition of growing and processing flax and hemp in the Bohemian region of the Czech Republic continued with the advent of industrialisation, with spinning machines and textile factories, but often ended after the Second World War with the import of more productive export crops, often with a colonial background, such as cotton. The artist works with the last remaining flax and hemp processors in the region.
Inside, the tapestries create sheltered zones of peace and security, enveloping the visitors as they walk among them. Three speaker towers are distributed throughout the hall and guide visitors further into the installation with a sound composition: singing by the Lada women’s choir in Moravian micro-dialects, ringing church bells, instrumental passages and Czech lyrics by rapper Yzomandias. The soundtrack was developed by Berlin and Brussels-based composer and performance artist Billy Bultheel. The loudspeakers were sourced from Berlin techno clubs. Dusty, scratched and partially defective, they allude to the theme of decay. Visitors walk across more than 3,000 square concrete slabs, which remind Hosnedlová of the pavements in her hometown where she played as a child. Nature breaks through the regular surface of the built environment with earth and puddles. The industrial architecture of the hall is reflected in the epoxy puddles. The hard concrete slabs contrast with the hanging, soft flax and hemp sculptures. They refer both to the brutalist concrete architecture of communist Eastern Central Europe in the 1970s and to the urban landscape of Berlin.
Eight dark metal walls on the long sides of the spacious hall frame the scene. Seven sand-coated reliefs hang on these walls and on the tapestries. The textures resemble fossils and refer to Moravia’s prehistoric past. At the same time, they are reminiscent of socialist wall friezes in public buildings in communist Eastern Central Europe. As a child, the artist collected fossils as treasures bearing traces of another world. Elements of coloured, milky glass also protrude sharply from the wall reliefs on the metal walls. The fragile glass and the massive, stone-like sculptures combine fragility and strength. To produce the hand-cast glass objects, Hosnedlová works with artisans whose techniques and knowledge have been passed down through generations.
Extremely fine embroidery is incorporated into the reliefs, embroidered images of fleeting moments. They show fragments from performances for the camera that the artist staged and photographed in Berlin and in earlier exhibitions: outstretched fingers, a lighter, a naked back. A performance without an audience, which took place at the Hamburger Bahnhof, serves as the source of images for the artist’s next installation.
The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil, Director of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Curator, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.
